David Hart

David Hart, who died on January 5 aged 66, was a property developer, farmer,
occasional novelist and playwright who was bankrupted but nonetheless became
the confidant of cabinet ministers.

David Hart

5:57PM GMT 05 Jan 2011

A libertarian, he entered into Margaret Thatcher’s circle and to an extent the public consciousness in 1984 when helping rebel miners to thwart the year-long strike called by Arthur Scargill and the NUM. A larger-than-life figure, he attracted enemies as easily as he did friends. The occasionally preposterous sense of mystery he cultivated about himself belied a man who was erudite, sensitive, generous and had a devoted circle of friends.

Thick-set, jowly and mustachioed, Hart described himself as a “Renaissance man” and assumed the air of a slightly dissipated 18th-century dilettante. In his younger days he bore a striking resemblance to Lord Lucan. However, some found his extrovert loquacity, his impossibly long cigars and his Sun King lifestyle and demeanour to be too strong meat.

To his friends, Hart’s appeal lay in his hospitality, his pronounced anarchic streak and his capacity to explain the world with beguiling clarity and wit. He lived in some style in Suffolk, first at Coldham Hall, near Bury St Edmunds — which he sold to the model Claudia Schiffer — and then at nearby Chadacre, a fine 18th-century house that had been ruined by being an agricultural institute, and which Hart at great expense restored to beyond its original glory.

There, politicians would find refuge from the drudgery and Formica of constituency surgeries to enjoy sparkling conversation and hobnob with Hart’s eclectic circle of friends. In August, Hart’s court would decamp to stalk at the lodge he rented in Scotland.

There were many, however, notably in the Tory party, who detected a whiff of sulphur about Hart. His enemies likened him to Rasputin and accused him of being an agent of the CIA, the KGB, Mossad, or of all three — charges which had the great merit of being impossible to disprove.

Related Articles

That Hart’s name rarely appeared in the press without the epithets “shadowy” or “sinister” rather betrayed the fact that he was neither. He was not a man to downplay his influence, so even his friends never knew how much was genuine and how much Walter Mitty. For all his admirers, there were always those who struggled to take him seriously.

David Hart was born on February 4 1944. His Jewish father, Louis “Boy” Hart, was chairman of Henry Ansbacher, the merchant bank. His mother was Irish, and Hart himself was baptised into the Church of England.

At Eton he was bullied as “Jewy Hart” or “Spiv”, but the experience toughened him. After calmly enduring the abuse of one anti-semite for several weeks he finally rammed the boy’s head into a radiator, after which the abuse stopped. He left at 16, wanting to make films, and launched himself on to the screen with a short entitled Sitting Quietly, Doing Nothing, Spring Crop Comes and the Grass Grows by Itself. A review of another film, Sleep is Lovely (1968), which he directed and for which he wrote the screenplay, described Hart as having “the self-assurance of a tank topped with the Eton Ring of Confidence”.

By this time he had begun to dabble in property. In 1968, after reports that two “squatters” had had to be rescued, weak from lack of food and water, from Sunk Head Tower, a sea fort about 11 miles off the Essex coast, Hart admitted that he had paid the men to stay on the fort in order to enable him to lay claim to it and exploit it “for commercial purposes”.

The property boom of the late 1960s earned Hart his first million, but his extravagance ended with the bust of the mid-1970s, debts of £959,229 and an appearance in the bankruptcy court in 1975. The court heard that Hart kept two mistresses, each of whom had his child, in separate London flats, paying them each £250 a month as well as money for things like telephone bills and school fees.

He ran a fleet of cars but commuted by helicopter between his London pad and his then estate in Somerset. He kept staff at both addresses. The official receiver castigated his “delusions of grandeur” and took exception to the fact that many of Hart’s creditors were small tradesmen (including, reporters were delighted to discover, his gamekeeper’s tailor). “You give me the impression you have lived in cloud cuckoo land,” the receiver told him. “I’m afraid I’ve been very silly,” Hart admitted. For all his charisma, there was a vulnerability about him that attracted many.

Hart lost everything down to his fountain pen. His mother sent round her butler to look after him in his misery. Indeed, it was thanks to his family that he soon restored his position (and his lifestyle), exchanging the estate in Somerset for one in Suffolk. In 1978 he was discharged from bankruptcy after his brother paid off many of his debts. Around the same time he inherited a substantial sum from his father, which he added to with further dealings in the property market in the 1980s.

When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, her advocacy of the free market fired Hart’s enthusiasm. He first met her in 1980 at the annual dinner of the Centre for Policy Studies. It was the start of his 10-year career as a “Downing Street irregular”, during which he bombarded her with policy papers on everything from agriculture to armaments.

Hart’s biggest political break came during the 1984 miners’ strike when, posing as a feature writer, he toured mining areas in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes and had himself introduced to the Coal Board’s chairman, Sir Ian McGregor, at a House of Lords party. Sir Ian later wrote: “I began to realise he was the man I had been looking for.” Hart was said to have financed groups of strikebreaking miners in Nottinghamshire, encouraging them to form a breakaway union over lunch in his suite at Claridge’s, and to have arranged for legal actions against the National Union of Mineworkers.

Yet as the dispute faded, so did Hart’s influence at No 10. In the 1990s The Observer obtained a letter from Hart to Mrs Thatcher, written in 1985, in which he begged her to resume their friendship. The estrangement apparently began when, in the course of lobbying on behalf of a British bid (against French competition) to sell the Americans a $5 billion military communications system, Hart claimed in a letter to the US ambassador that anti-Americanism was “incipient in Britain” and that Mrs Thatcher was only just managing to hold it in check. “A decision to buy French would make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to hold that line,” with possibly disastrous consequences for the Anglo-American special relationship, Hart had warned. Whitehall and the State Department reportedly “went ballistic”. The contract went to France.

In his letter to her, Hart reminded Mrs Thatcher of “the steps that I undertook during the miners’ strike, without which, frankly, the strike would have been lost”. Then, in the course of a grovelling apology for his role in the defence bid, he told her: “I have conceived an entirely proper and considerable affection for you. It is out of that affection, as well as out of a sense of duty to my Country, that I have acted in the past and now write this letter.”

But, as the letter also made clear, Hart’s fall from grace had been dramatic. At the time he composed it, he was in such bad odour that he had even been refused a pass to the party conference. Mrs Thatcher’s political secretary, Stephen Sherbourne, Hart complained, had accused him of falsely representing himself to the Americans as the Prime Minister’s plenipotentiary. Sherbourne, Hart wrote, “effectively called me a liar. He told me you [Mrs Thatcher] wanted no further contact with me.”

Hart added that neither Sherbourne nor Mrs Thatcher’s private secretary, Charles Powell, was returning his calls. “I am forced to conclude,” he went on, revealingly, “that those who find one such as I just too inconvenient, too difficult to define and contain, too ready to speak openly and plainly to you, too unwilling to act by the court rules your advisers and civil servants impose, have seized on this opportunity to sow distrust between us and render me unable to assist you.”

The “wall of officials” around the Prime Minister, he maintained, was “probably the greatest danger to all of your and my hopes for achieving the kind of Britain that forms the basis of our shared vision. Selfless acts are greeted with the deepest suspicion by commonplace people.”

In spite of everything, Hart worked his way back into favour, maintaining his political profile by founding the Campaign for a Free Britain and issuing newsletters propounding his anti-Soviet views. With some help from Rupert Murdoch, he secretly financed a newsletter, British Briefing, edited by Charles Elwell, a former MI5 officer in charge of “counter-subversion”.

The restoration of his reputation was helped by his being intellectually ahead of the tide, leading the condemnation of Left-wing totalitarianism before the liberation movements that brought down the Berlin wall had started to get under way. Hart had friends and contacts among the resisters in the Soviet bloc and was as well-informed as anyone in Britain about what was going on there.

His financing of virulent full-page anti-Labour advertisements in the national press during the 1987 general election went down well with many in the Tory party. But Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe was less pleased to be pictured on the cover of a Hart pamphlet, published in time for the 1988 party conference, giving what looked like a Black Power salute at a conference in southern Africa, when (it was claimed) he had only been swatting a fly. In the pamphlet’s conclusion it stated: “The Foreign Office is one of the last of the great British institutions that has escaped the refreshing breath of Thatcherism.”

Hart made a move to try to get in with John Major, but was brushed aside, and his one realistic chance to enter Parliament disappeared when — at Central Office’s prompting — his local Conservative association in Bury St Edmunds rejected his application to contest the seat at the 1992 election.

But he still had friends in high places, and in 1993 he popped up again as an unpaid adviser on waste to Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind. He stayed on when Rifkind was replaced in 1995 by Michael Portillo, a friend of Hart’s of long standing, who widened Hart’s brief to include some of the £9 billion-a-year procurement contracts awarded by the MoD.

There was outrage in the House of Commons when Hart’s enhanced role became known. It was pointed out that he had written a number of opinionated articles about the inadequacies of British defence contractors which might prejudice his judgment. In 1993 he had accused British Aerospace of making “specious claims” about the Eurofighter, adding: “From a military point of view, there are undoubtedly cheaper and more timely solutions to our defence requirement” (notably buying second-hand American aircraft). In another article he had suggested that British defence companies should become “little more than metal bashers for United States companies”.

The precise extent of Hart’s influence as a special adviser remains a matter for conjecture, though his cost-cutting proposals may have saved the taxpayer between £150 million and £200 million a year. In political terms, however, Michael Portillo might have had cause to regret some of his adviser’s well-intentioned efforts on his behalf.

Hart was credited with having written the controversial “Who Dares Wins” coda to Portillo’s ill-judged Tory conference speech of 1995. The same year, after John Major resigned as leader of the Conservative Party and challenged his critics to “put up or shut up”, Hart set up what he called “The Shadow Organisation” to prepare the ground for Portillo to enter the race for the leadership in a second round, installing a set of telephone lines in a convenient “campaign headquarters” in Westminster. Portillo, who had publicly been protesting his loyalty to Major during the first ballot contest with John Redwood, was left looking compromised and foolish.

After the New Labour landslide of 1997, Hart left active politics, though he maintained links with Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s private secretary and the brother of Charles. While he had no role in Whitehall any more, he was a sometimes useful conduit of information to Downing Street, notably on security matters. He kept up high-level contacts both in America and the Middle East. There was for a time a cooling in his relations with Portillo, in whose challenge for the Tory leadership in 2001 he played no part.

In 2004 a warrant for Hart’s arrest was issued by the government of Equatorial Guinea in connection with an alleged coup attempt, supposedly masterminded by his fellow Old Etonian Simon Mann. In a letter from prison in March, Mann had told his wife: “Our situation is not good and it is very urgent. We need heavy influence of the sort that ... Smelly [thought to be the Chelsea-based oil billionaire Eli Calil], Scratcher [Sir Mark Thatcher] ... David Hart [can bring] and it needs to be used heavily and now. Once we get into a real trial scenario we are f****d.”

As well as his political and property activities, Hart wrote two novels: The Colonel (rich Jewish hero struggles against prejudice and misunderstanding) and Come To The Edge (which had a similar theme). He also wrote a number of plays which, like his novels, were strongly symbolic of his own Jewish background and his political activities. These included Statues of Liberty, in which the figure of Machiavelli comes to modern Britain, where, for the purpose of experiment, he sees how quickly he can bring down the government by the simple expedient of inspiring an anarchist mob to hack the genitals from the statues of every statesman in the country. It works; the Home Secretary resigns and the government falls.

Hart was at his happiest on his estate at Chadacre, surrounded by his children, his friends and his children’s friends. Most weekends 20 or 30 people would sit down to meals. As well as restoring his house to the highest standards he planted new woodlands and built up a superb shoot. He was a committed field sportsman and rode to hounds until illness prevented him.

As well as politicians, his table and drawing-room had a lively throughput of senior military officers, academics, scientists, writers and artists.

In 2006 he was diagnosed with a form of motor neurone disease. Despite extensive attempts to try to contain the condition, his decline was sudden. In typical style he put up an immense fight, but his debilitation was serious, worst of all in robbing him of his ability to communicate: conversation had always been his greatest hobby.

David Hart had an Edwardian attitude to women. In 1976 he married Christina Williams, a divorcee with whom he had two sons. He had a son by a German woman, Karen Weis, and daughters by two long-term girlfriends, Hazel O’Leary and Kate Agazarian. His private life marked him out as a romantic, but was also indicative of a Technicolor approach to life in which boredom and predictability were always the enemy. His five children and their four mothers all survive him.